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Event Information

Date and Time

Location

UCL Bloomsbury Campus

Room TBC

London

Event description

Description

The inaugural lecture of Yacob Mulugetta, Professor of Energy and Development Policy, and Director of the MPA Programme at the Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP) at University College London.

Africa finds itself at the heart of a momentous global energy conversation. The region’s energy and development reality evokes deep emotions about the scandal of energy poverty and new optimism about the huge opportunities that lie ahead in energy investments. To this end, numerous real world experiments are taking place across Africa on various ‘energy futures’ with a view to unlock local and global resources (human and financial) and simultaneously deal with major national and global challenges such as climate change. What is also emerging is that how ideas around the ‘energy challenge’ play out is highly dependent on the national and supra-national political context and dynamics, and is thus deeply influenced by competing narratives. For example, different actors bring to the stage their particular understandings of what constitutes ‘energy poverty’ and what is to be done about it, and these dominant and competing accounts interact to shape specific interventions and policies.

Currently top-down approaches dominate the ‘solution space’ where investment imperatives often take a narrow view, giving more weight to return on investment and engineering design criteria and less to goals of social inclusiveness and equity. This raises numerous questions: whose energy security and access predominates? How are investment decisions reached and who decides? How can citizens be accommodated in this discussion, especially the poorest? How should resources be governed? The lecture will explore in some depth the dominant narratives that are shaping the African energy landscape, how these narratives are constructed and sustained, and discuss ways to open new energy dialogues that reflect the interests and priorities of a broader spectrum of people and communities. The talk will also sketch out the research and policy opportunities in this area.